Mapping sight to touch takes time to learn

FIVE children in India have helped answer a question posed in 1688 by Irish philosopher William Molyneux: can a blind person who gains their vision recognise by sight an object they previously knew only by touch?

After surgery to give the children sight for the first time, Richard Held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked them to feel a toy block without looking at it. He then showed them two blocks, one of which was the block they had touched. They identified the original block from sight alone just 58 per cent of the time.